January 2016
Estranged Elders,
I will do my best to keep this communication as succinct as possible. I have as little desire to communicate with you as any of you would desire communication from me. However, I created life with one of your relatives and that fact will transcend time regardless of any court order of termination of my parental rights. It is out of concern for their futures that I reluctantly dare share my contemplations.
Nearly 20 years ago when my sons were at the dawn of their existence I reached out to you--- my sons’ collateral kin when the kindred in their direct lineage proved to be radical. I reached out to you instinctively because I was clueless. I did not know what to do about the ‘dung’ that I had to manage when dealing with the singletons. All I knew is that the ‘bubble’ of protection that I had expected to grow my family in was ‘shoddy’ and crumbling. I felt like a ‘dead woman walking’ because I seemed to have married into a cult and it would be over my dead body before I let my children grow up with a step-mom, step-siblings and half-siblings robbing them of their birth rights because I refused to be transformed by the wicked (i.e. ‘obey’and align with the indiscretions that plagued my once charming and morally grounded baby-daddy).
What could you all have done at the turn of the century for my family…I did not know. I just knew that I did all that I could (including seeking help from his mother) you all were the elders in the village that helped shape the man I had grown to love and chose to procreate with and he was lost in the wilderness without a compass or wise counsel from his parents. My dad always told us when we were growing up to remember that, ‘home is a soft place to fall.’ Meaning that if we ever lose our way or get overwhelmed with life to know that we can always come home to recharge, focus, and get back in touch with who we are and where we came from. It sickens me that everyone rallied around ‘wrong’ where my family was concerned making the plan my baby-daddy and I had for growing our family (raising our children together in a nuclear home in the nurture and admonition of the Lord surrounded by a large and protective extended family) expendable. It saddens me immensely that the man I loved who fathered my children did not have a soft place to fall.
In the earliest years of this turmoil I have been obfuscated to the point of ad nauseum, mental anguish and emotional distress trying to comprehend how or why I was being accused of ‘trying to ruin the career of my baby-daddy’. I don’t even know how that accusation reconciles with common sense. To ruin the man’s career, I need only to have gone to his commander, the newspapers, or my dear-ol’-dad. Ruining his career would have reduced the resources available for my sons to launch their futures. The accusation was as asinine as the behaviors of the accusers but it prevailed. I was seeking help, prayer, wise counsel, or something! Anything! What I got was hostility, rejection, and an unjustifiable disregard
for the future of my sons’ Christ ordained family-form. I didn’t know what to do or what could be done but I knew that sitting idly-by and doing nothing would gain nothing….so I reluctantly aired the ‘dirty laundry’ with collateral kin by sharing my memoir (I felt like I was a ‘dead woman walking’…I would save my family or die trying).
Reggie’s sons are once again vulnerable; they are at the dawn of their manhood. In 2001 when they were at the dawn of their existence I perceived an ameliorable threat to the basic tenets of their family’s foundation and I asked for help, there was none. Will history repeat itself? Once again I perceive an ameliorable threat to my sons’ futures. The elizaBICH and I are 2 warring mothers. She’s passionate about what she perceives as a ‘wrong’ acted upon her adult son (his assassination). I am passionate about what I perceive as many-wrongs acted against my baby-boys (denial of their rights and privileges of being conceived and born in wedlock, wonton overt exploitation of their innocence, blatant disregard for the Christian doctrine by which they were dedicated and we vowed to uphold in raising them, etc). Am I livid regarding these matters? No, I’m not livid. I’m beyond livid. I’m ‘activated’! But I exercise restraint, discipline, empathy (for how my actions would impact my offspring), and maternal sensitivities regarding the tears minor children cry. These are past devastations and the opportunity for any of us to affect a better outcome has past. My intention with this communication is to change the trajectory of a perceived potential devastation. The elizaBICH and I a caustic to one another’s existence. With my sons approaching manhood, I am certain it (the elizaBICH) will continue to impress its will regarding me on their adult lives as it did with its adult son regarding me). I am NOT at a loss as to my options for resolution regarding this enigma; however, leaving the elizaBICH or me to our ‘best practices’ regarding one another is catastrophic and is not in any way in the best interest of Reggie’s sons.
If truth be told, it would be undoubtedly revealed that the elizaBICH wants me to die in prison like my dad and I am not afraid to say outright that I want her dead, buried, and burning in Hades liker her baby-daddy and mine. These are horrendous dynamics for anyone’s’ direct lineage…but this is the reality for the family dynamics of those Reggie and I spawned. I did not initiate this war within my sons’ family but it will end! How; that’s yet to be determined.
Reg and I had captured the American dream…all we had to do was live it and share our bounties with those among us and allow all those who came after to stand on our shoulders to harness their dreams. As an example I’ll state my reflections of what our ‘plan A’ entailed. Our babies would be tri-lingual at the very least (ASL was their first language and they learned German and English simultaneously; however, my most fluent foreign language passion is Spanish so they would have learned Spanish from German AND I was hoping to go to Japan from Germany, so the boys and I were learning Japanese). They were raised in the home of a xenophobe and I am certain that despite the plan God had for their familial relations they are uni lingual and have never taken a trip oversees. Being raised in the family God intended we would have visited at least 3 different countries (Germany, Haiti, and Copenhagen due to familial or fictive kinships); however, I believe that an interest in doing missionary work with our church would have also taken us to foreign lands. We surely would have welcomed foreign exchange students from Germany and Hispanic countries into our home…how sad for our sons that they were denied these experiences. Our sons are being raise by a xenophobe! Go figure. Reg was ahead of our time in his entrepreneurial pursuits. Our home was automated before ‘home automation’ was popular. We had a Home Automation business. If he were here I think he would have been extremely successful in that area and would now be involve with Artificial Intelligence which is probably the next technological outbreak. His sons would be privy to his genius in that area. Instead, they are being raised by someone 50-years their senior. The ‘bich can’t contribute close to what they would have gained from their father’s tutelage! My passion is martial arts. Reg said he would take it up one day. I imagined that someday we would own a studio and our sons would grow up in the arts and someday teach classes at our studio. I imagined that we would frequent the scenes and maybe compete in such things as the American Ninja Warrior Competitions…WHY NOT!!!! We had what it takes, grit, determination, and commitment…Why-the-hades-NOT. The World was ours to command. We could have done anything we set our minds to…as a unit (a family)!!! Look at the Obamas, if we were into politics (which we are NOT), could that not have been our family in the White House? Of course it could have been! But NOOOO! We are **ck-ups!!! African Americans just can’t seem to get out of their own way. If our Blessings had been given to any other ethnic group (Africans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Caucasians, Asians, Indians, etc) and you check in on then 20-years later, they all would be thriving. They would be living the American dream and their relatives would also have a piece of the proverbial ‘pie’… but African Americans….no, not us!!! We gotta **ck it up! NOT just for ourselves but also for our offspring!
My baby-daddy didn’t get it wrong. He’s not the scoundrel in our life’s tale (his mama is!). Reggie was virile and he had a healthy libido. He was a man doing what any warm blooded healthy American man would do. He was testing the boundaries of his relationship. He was ‘seeing’ what he could get away with and learning how to ‘treat’ his wife. What Reggie did with his genitalia was between him and the wooden-god he served. But what he did with our children was subject to maternal sensitivities and innate dispositions…and so they were. You all, especially David and the elizaBICH failed my baby-daddy. Y’all were in absentia when he needed your counsel! Reggie needed wise council from the ‘village’ elders and he got none. You all left our sons to the admonition of the courts. Thus their young lives and the relationships therein were defined by the U.S Family Court System and not by God’s perfect will.
Learning how to treat your wife is ‘learned behavior’ (Reggie was emulating in our marriage what he learned about marriage and family from his youth). Protecting your children from inherent threats is innate (when Reggie ‘tapped-out’ and abnegated his role as a full time parent to our sons my innate sensitivities and primal instincts were activate). Clearly, protecting his family was not a priority for the man who procreated with me. He valued the tangible over the intangible treasures of the many gifts and blessings bestowed upon us. I stand-by my decision in 2001 to fight for my children’s rights. Reggie and the elizaBICH’s conviction against my sons’ family (Reggie’s and my ‘plan A’) can be likened to the feces-of-a-bull!!! The only way its gonna ‘happen’ is over my dead body.
What’s the problem you ask…well let me explain.
Reggie ‘tapped-out!’, the laws of the land allowed him to abnegate his role as a full-time parent to his sons when he ran to the court with a lawyer and ‘made for TV-drama’ terminology such as ‘irreconcilable differences’ and ‘Singleton-vs-Singleton’. Our sons are ages 3 and 5. His unilateral decree of divorce gives him secular-permission to ‘start over’. His ONLY obligation to the lives he planned and created in love is a child support check for the next 15 years (what happens after that 15 years for my sons’ future and resources therein). Meanwhile, of course, he has a ‘wild card’ to go on his parallel journey (‘starting-over’) to create all kinds of obstacles and liabilities to my sons’ existence that will transcend time (step-kindred, half-kindred, emotional scars and so-on) with impunity!!!! Over my dead body!!! Why is that okay with you people! You all did not accept that Bull-Dung for your snotty-nosed kids!!!!!! Why should I?????? Why was my children’s family expendable…because Reggie had an M-D-after his name????? I didn’t marry him for the M-D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I married him because I loved him, because I thought he was mature, grounded in his faith, and I believed he would be a great father...a wonderful provider and protector of his family (me, marry for love…. NEVER AGAIN)! I didn't misjudge Reggie (I don't think). I underestimated the role his mother would have in our relationship.
Dwonna grew up in the same household with my baby-daddy and was exposed to the same dysfunction that he was indoctrinated with. I would wager that she didn’t allow her spouse to infect her offspring with whatever ‘wooden -god’ doctrine he was imprinted with from his up-bringing. Why was I supposed to let my sons be imprinted with the dysfunction of their dad and grand-dad’s indiscretions??????!!!!!!!!
Here I am, five-pages-in. I said I was gonna keep this succinct. Well, I take it back. I will not be succinct! I am passionate about what happened to my family and I had a front row seat in its annihilation. My account is a 1st person account and NOT conjecture!!! I paid my dues and I am entitled to have my ‘say’! And I say, the elizaBICH killed-us! She **cked over her son to elevate her agenda!!! He needed guidance and she and David lead him astray!!! And my children are paying the price. What say you?
I know my family’s history; that’s what I attribute to my successes in life (knowledge is power). My paternal grandfather did to his family of 11-kids, what Reggie attempted to do to his family of 2-kids. He left the kids to be raised by their mother and he ‘started-over’. He moved around the corner into a four-sided brick home with its manicured lawn with his ‘love interest’, procreated, and left his first family to ‘fend’ for themselves in their wooden shack. My youngest uncle (less than a decade older than me and my siblings) shared a memory of a time when he was walking home from school barefoot in the pouring rain and his dad drove by in his truck with his half-sister in the front seat and did not even stop to offer him a ride. Clearly times has changed and going to school bare-foot is no longer a reality for the destitute. The point is that the birth order privileges of my grandfather’s offspring was usurped. His 12th child had greater privileges and was a benefactor of her father’s meager resources over the needs of his 11th child (as well as the other children). Reggie was my Grandpa-Lester incarnate. It would have been over my dead body before I allowed my children to live the 21st century equivalent of my Grandma’s tribulations. My uncles’ lives were negatively affected by their dad’s indiscretions (the aunts did okay). When drugs, incarcerations, and suicide became par for course for my dad’s siblings it wasn’t when they were in Grade School or High School, it was when they became adults and had to navigate the challenges therein. Now that the ‘singletons’-will has been done’ on the lives of my minor sons. What is your agenda for the adult-lives of the fruits of Reggie and my loins??? My Grandma had 11 kids; 5 fell victim to society…Reg and I only have 2. We don’t want either of them to fall victim to society. You took them out of our care, what’s your plan????!!!!!!
Now that our sons are scarred-for-life; they are without a ‘blue print’ for navigating manhood (everything they learned about being men was learned from women, collateral or fictive kin). They do not have a ‘blue print’ on how to Head a household, or parent their children, or have a healthy relationship with their spouse. They are burdened with the lies of maternal abandonment and neglect. What is yawl’s plans for compensating those young men for the deficits you all imposed (by your actions or failure to act) upon their young lives. If you don’t have a plan, I guarantee you, the State does!
I am in 2016 where you all were in 2001. I have 2-generations of consanguineous kin beneath me (I am an Elder… I wish I had my partner!). I cannot imagine for the life of me that I would pass up an opportunity to provide wise counsel to any of my nieces or nephews who are in the throes of discarding their family if they have the interests of young children to protect. They do not have to adhere to my counsel but it is my responsibility as an elder to provide it.
Most often the mainstream of counsel comes from those within one’s direct lineage, but clearly my offspring’s familial ties are aberrant. Those in their direct lineage seem cult-like to me and I am compelled to implore their collateral kin (you all) to take notice and act on their behalves (Y’all can’t all be demons!). I do not know how or what you can or should do (maybe I will know in 20 -years if I’m still here.) but you all have at least 20-years of wisdom beyond mine that you can call upon. If I had the wisdom of my years-now in 2001, I would have chosen a different course of action for trying to rescue my baby-daddy from his own moral turpitudes.
Reg’s sons are on the precipice of manhood. You all have had 15-years to plan and device counter-measures for what their losses are as a result of the fallout of the elizaBICH’s son acting on her advice to ‘cut his losses’. Unfortunately for those young men, true to the nature of narcissists the creature who raised them is incapable of empathizing or conceptualizing the impact (morally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, cognitively, and otherwise) the annihilation of their family, the loss of their father, the loss of their mother, the loss of all their maternal relatives and the other innumerable losses both tangible and tangible; seen and unforeseen would have on their foundation and their ‘blue print’ on which to pattern their adult behaviors or grow their families (now or in 2001).
These young men are now (unless you all device a plan) ‘sentenced’ to spend the rest of their lives taking ‘tests’ that they were not given answers to. Everything they learned about manhood had to be taught to them by women, collateral or fictive male-kin. Because Reggie ‘tapped’ out, his sons don’t have a ‘blue print’ on how to build and maintain a healthy partnership with a virtuous woman (anybody can placate a gold digger or a lackey). Those young men who share your DNA will never get over what their losses were when our family was not protected. We all (my generation and yours) will be dead and in our graves when those young men are still living with the misfortune of having their family destroyed and denied the advantages and privileges of being raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord by the parents they were gifted to. I’m a grown-*ss-woman and I am still disturbed by this bull-dung! And I had a ‘say’…those young men didn’t have a ‘say’!
Maybe you all didn’t have the foresight in 2001 to know what my plight was about regarding my family and what challenges loomed ahead for Reggie’s sons’ future without intervention but you’re older and presumingly wiser now. I assure you, standing on the shore like lighthouses keeping boats from crashing into the rocks or sticking your heads in the sand like ostriches is NOT the effort that is required here. The elizaBICH didn’t just sit around hoping and praying for her son’s marriage to fail…she was an active participant (she acted like a jealous lover instead of a matriarch). Likewise, with the annihilation of his family. I wager the degenerate does not have a plan on how to actively keep these young men clear of a self-destructive manhood (the devil comes to kill, steal, and destroy); therefore, I implore you all to use your collective wisdom and expertise to devise a plan-program-intervention-something!!! to keep those beautiful black men from falling victim to the system whose decrees, ruling, and orders defined their familial ties for most of their childhood. If you all do not have a plan to guarantee those men’s successes, it is without question the system has a plan for responding to their failures.
I am not a complicated individual. I am very simple and so was my spouse. I know the premises on which I stand. I am not fickle. Neither of us were perfect but together we had the qualities to assure a secure and Godly home for our children to thrive happily and prepare themselves to face the peaks and valleys of adulthood. Reggie was not my blood relative but he was my family. He was the father of my children. His place of priority within our nuclear home was second to Christ. The family-form Reggie and I had when we created our family was non-negotiable (as I said, I am not fickle). The man I married told me several times before we married that he did not believe in divorce. That same assertion was embedded in his proposal to me. The matriarch also told me the same thing. She told me no one in her family had ever been divorced and they did not believe in divorcing and that she would not blindly take her sons side in a dispute. Much to my chagrin and my offspring’s misfortune they lied!!!
When Reggie was in the family he had the protection of the family. He had a lifetime to model better family dynamics for his children to emulate in their homes than the model his parents exposed him and his sister to. There are countless ways to manage the dynamics within the family and succeed at marital longevity. Taking the good years with the bad. Sharing and celebrating the milestones of each of our accomplishments throughout the years and supporting and encouraging one another through trialing times. It’s not rocket-science. My siblings have been married a combined total of nearly 100 years. None of my brother in-laws or my sister in-law fancied themselves too educated or supreme to put in the team work of raising a family. Of all the ways to manage a family successfully, Reggie chose the one way to be sure to have his children live beneath their privileges…to give up. To put our family in the courts and allow the system to make monumental decisions about matters that were clearly according to our faith family business!
I had 2 sets of grandparents and I knew and loved both sets. My siblings and I got to know our grandparents the same way Reggie and his sibling got to know their grandparents, by a being part of a family unit with a supportive extended family. The elizaBICH’s angst over not being able to know her grandkids if Reg and I divorced was a devil’s brew. Did it not occur to the wicked old troll that encouraging her son to maintain the sanctity of his marriage would have also assured her that she would have maintained a relationship with her grandkids the same way countless families across the globe maintain family ties. I never threatened her relationship with her grandkids that insane notion was all in her demented head.
I once respected the woman who was the mother of my best friend, my lover, my husband, my help-mate, the father of my children but please forgive me, that respect has waned. Ask yourselves, how much respect would you have for an individual who allowed their disdain for you to usurp their maternal and spiritual responsibilities regarding their own-and-only-son as well as the security and well-being of their grandsons. The elizabich didn’t know me but for whatever reason, she allowed her disdain for me to trump common sense and any maternal sensitivities she ever had.
God didn’t send Reggie out into the world to select a mate who was outgoing, friendly, and capable of being cozy and beholden to his mother. He was blessed with a wife who was compatible with him and complementary to his deficits as he was complementary to my deficits. Reggie and I did what we were supposed to do and in proper order in accordance with our faith. So, yes, I do now have disdain for the home-wrecker who acted more like a jealous/jilted ex-lover rather than a responsible and Godly Elder/mother-in-law and put herself at enmity with me. I’m only human.
Statistically speaking, with one-in-three African American men spending some portion of their lives in prison, I once again reach out to you educated-fools (as my dad referred to you-all as a collective) to utilize your expertise in a coordinated effort to neutralize the impact of these boys’ tragic childhood. My uncles and aunts who grew up with the dysfunction of divorce and abandonment by their dad did not lose their way (drugs, alcohol, incarcerations, suicides, etc) until they were adults, married with children (or had children out of wedlock). I fear my sons may experience adult relationship complexities as a result of their family’s dysfunction and the maternal abandonment they think has occurred in their lives.
These boys have a life to live well beyond the years we Elders have remaining on this planet and I don’t want them to live it in turmoil because their village failed them. Knowledge is power.
Reggie didn’t *uck-up in youth. He was nearly 40-years old when he was misguided (his family’s dysfunction reared its ugly head). Home is supposed to be a ‘soft place to fall’. He lost his way and his moral compass was compromised by the world…he was transformed. When I reached out to his ‘home-base’, not one of you stepped-up and sided with me to help redirect him towards his ‘center’ or encouraged him to focus on his family. Although, you all valued your families and raised your children in intact homes (so did my parents and my siblings) but Reggie saw his family as disposable and you all decided to ‘go with the flow’. Now we need to assure this bull*hit doesn’t transcend time and infect Que and Terrence’s offspring.
Deidre
